Well, I decided to go through with it. I kept an audio diary of my trip to Washington. I think it conveys better than writing some of the emotions of the trip. I didn’t get to do interviews, like I wanted – there was just no good time to actually […]
Each year, about 50 physicists from all across the United States and, in a few cases, the globe, converge on Washington D.C. to bring messages to our lawmakers. These messages include thanks, first and foremost, for the support we receive for science. High-energy physics is a difficult enterprise to sell […]
Next week, I will be co-leading a team of physicists from the SLAC community to Washington D.C. As I remarked in my professional blog, the number of research physicists in Washington D.C. may spike next week in a historically unique way [1]. I haven’t done any audio projects in a […]
This last week’s episode of the TV show “Bones”, named “The Science in the Physicist”, featured the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, a suspect in the murder of a theoretical physicist sent over a hundred death threats to the victim because he feared the end of the world when the LHC […]
Everybody needs a day that’s just about them. Birthdays don’t count – people see that coming. You need one of those great, unexpected my days, one that is delicious because you spring it on people. OK, mine wasn’t all that spontaneous. I spent my Sunday afternoon two Sundays ago, and […]
The weekly critical look at the media, NPR’s “On the Media”, did a piece on the changes to Texas science standards. It’s a good piece, and has the great quote from TEA Chairman McLeroy about “standing up to experts”. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/01
The House and Senate both passed their Budget Resolutions last week. These are not actual appropriations. Instead, they are guidance on how to budget money in this and coming years (up to 2014, in this case). The right way to think about the budget resolution is as a ceiling; you’ll […]
Jodi runs a Stanford post-doc book club, and a few months ago the club’s book was “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. That book catapaulted Pollan into the public eye, making him a spokesperson for the food movement in this country. It’s not a wheatgrass and hemp-humping diatribe. It’s an […]
One of the funnier moments caught on video by NCSE during the TEA hearings [1] was when Chairman McLeroy misread seminal work by Stephen Jay Gould, and employed his misreading to justify teaching weaknesses of a scientific theory. Gould was a critic of the viewpoint that gradual changes in species […]
The case of a fired Texas Education Agency science director raises an interesting new development in the struggle in education between the definition of science and non-scientific forces seeking their way into the classroom [1]. It’s been a while since I paid close attention to these state-by-state developments [2], but […]
As I announced in my professional blog the other day [1], Jodi and I will be joining the faculty at Southern Methodist University [2] in August. We are VERY excited about this – the move to Dallas, teaching, mentoring students, hiring post-docs, establishing our future research careers. We rarely have […]
Last Thursday, I effectively went into a communication blackout owing to the visit of many family members. Jodi’s mom and dad, her sister, and her sister’s twin sons, all visited us for four days. We rented a minivan so that we could get around, stocked up on food for the […]